1898 and the Un-Incorporation of Puerto Rico

Emerging from a web-based archive about Puerto Rican citizenship legislation, this article concisely describes key historical events and congressional decisions that have occurred since the United States annexed Puerto Rico and how they have affected Puerto Rican citizenship. Venator-Santiago argues that the fluctuating and unstable status of Puerto Rican citizenship has to do with the contradictory status of the Island as an unincorporated territory. Under this classification, constitutionally, Puerto Rico can be treated selectively as a foreign country or as part of the United States. While Puerto Ricans are officially US citizens, this article elucidates how Puerto Rico continues to be a separate and unequal territory.

Adding to constitutional scholarship, Foreign in a Domestic Sense is a collection of essays that examines the United States’ policies toward and relationship with its “unincorporated” territories. The authors in the collection show how racially rooted imperialism and colonialism are at the heart of this legal arrangement, while emphasizing the centrality of these territories when studying American constitutional history. The authors’ specific focus on Puerto Rico allows a deep analysis related to territorial status to emerge, where the Island must define itself within a nation that does not fully accept or reject it.

An academic study of constitutional law, The Insular Cases and the Emergence of American Empire, analyzes the indeterminate ways that the Constitution of the United States has or has not been applied to citizens of the islands that became part of the United States after the Spanish-American war: Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam. This work constitutes a close analysis of the “Insular Cases” in order to parse the distinction between incorporated and unincorporated territories and how, in the case of the latter, the completely variable and indeterminate manner in which the Court treated the constitutional status of the inhabitants. Through in depth legal research of how the United States justifies and practices imperialism, the author illustrates the evolution of the Court’s Incorporation Doctrine and how constitutional rights were applied to the new territories and their people.

This volume of legal scholarship contains a series of essays that emerged from a Harvard Law School conference that was organized to interrogate the Unites Sates’ Supreme Court decisions that became known as the “Insular Cases.” The Insular Cases allowed a partial application of the US Constitution to the territories acquired through conquest after the Spanish-Cuban-American war. The authors elucidate the history and legacy of the “Insular Cases,” exposing the ways in which they threaten civil and political rights. Expressing the need to challenge these outdated colonial laws, the authors raise questions about constitutional law and propose solutions such as changing the constitutional framework. They also propose different strategies that could remove territories from the jurisdiction of the Insular Cases doctrine.